As electronic business (ebusiness) grows, so does the need for better ways to share and manage large amounts of data. The amount of data storage required by today's ebusinesses is staggering. A good example of this is mail.com, which grew to 60 terabytes of storage in just 45 days.
Today almost all client access to large scale storage is accomplished by sending requests through general-purpose servers that connect an IP network (e.g., LAN or WAN) to the storage network (e.g., a Storage Area Networks (SAN)). Storage Area Networks provide access to large amounts of data storage.
SANs, however, are complex systems. A recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) study of 187 IT professionals stated, however, that only 20% of customers had installed SANs by the end of 1999. 46% of the respondents in that survey said they had no plans to install a SAN. The top four reasons for delaying or for deciding not to install a SAN were: high implementation costs, lack of qualified staff, technology immaturity, and lack of standards. Furthermore, although SANs typically are very good at connecting native storage resources, they are distance-limited and have no knowledge of IP and its priorities.
Often, customers outsource their storage to a SSP provider who will manage their storage needs for a predetermined fee. A typical application would use a distributed Fibre-Channel (FC) network to connect an IP network to FC devices located at either a local or a remote site. In this example, the S SP provides the entire storage infrastructure on the customers premises. While FC has numerous advantages, it lacks network management tools and is significantly higher priced than comparable Ethernet products. Most importantly, due to lack of network security, the SSP must create a separate Storage Area Network for each customer at the SSP to separate data from multiple customers.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for a system and method for accessing SANs over an IP network in a more integrated fashion.